Open letter of Love, Gratitude & Miscellaneous

[HawkerT]

Big Time Software have been rightly praised for CMBO and their responsiveness at this board many times before, but having felt the power of the tremendous CMBB demo, on my own body, I promised myself that I would take the time to write this post and give them some feedback. I will therefore rise from the silent masses and spill a few kind words, and if you get sick when good vibes hit the fan Big Time (pun intended), you should probably skip to the miscellaneous section of this post, or just skip it all together (the post is to long, my lingo is bad and I don’t bring much new to the table). Thou be now fairly warned.

Love and Gratitude:

Dear Big Time Software and crew – a.k.a. Battlefront.Com

How are you hanging in there? I hope that after releasing the demo, you will get some time now to take a deep breath, lift your eyes towards the blue sky, empty your minds and dream of things to come. I hope that despite all the hard work your hearts are still young and filled with the visions of that perfect war game that is the beacon towards which you sail. Stability is not about winning ten matches in a row, but about winning ten years in a row.

Besides setting a new higher standard for war gaming, you also run a tight ship. You handle this here fine board with finesse, integrity and humour, and manages to steer it clear of all the rocks and keeping it a friendly goldmine of information that keeps us all coming back for more.

When setting out on your original CM endeavour, you chose a path that might differ from the rest of the industry, but that you felt had to be taken because it is right. I find that this little story pictures it quite well: Two bulls, son and dad, are standing on top of a hill looking down on a herd of cows

Sonny Bull:

“Daddy, lets run down and hump a cow …”

Papa Bull:

“No son, lets walk down and hump them all !”

Your bold stand has definitely left you victorious. May your reign be long and prosperous.

Things I really love about CMBB so far:

The new step down the road of artillery improvements and infantry/MG improvements. For me this is the hidden gold of the CM series. The commendable effort to reinstate the queens of battle, thus creating the most realistic WWII war game ever. This of course coupled with the excellent new AFV features such as death clock, optics quality increments, Cover arc/ Hull down commands and incredible penetration/kill calculations. Keep improving this core guys, and the competition will never be able to catch you.

Looking very much forward to the new operations and any user created campaigns (starting the wave) made possible by the Quick Battle mouse hole left open by Charles, i.e. The ability to import the final autosave from a previous battle.

I definitely also like good visuals as much as the next guy. How about this for a new engine rewrite visual splendour - Shell rides, piggy bagging the shell from turret to target? Well just an old thought.

The new interface. I think that DeanCo has done a splendid job with things like the unit pictures, ordnance and weaponry pictures. The whole feel is more in par with the look of the characters, vehicles and terrain - a little bit cartoonish and clean yet realistic. For me the perfect visual expression of the game would be like the computer-animated film “Final Fantasy”. Any more realistic then that and I wouldn’t be able to stomach the reality of it all.

All the new visual effects are right on target. The smaller tracers, doodads, bullet impact dust, canister rounds etc. No more atomic buildings and tubes, exit the dreaded shockwave effect. The new firing visuals are simply astonishing, so much more realistic. I simply have to show Tigers picture again – say no more …

Miscellaneous:

Here is my ten cents worth on the sphere around the core of the game! I find the manual an extremely valuable asset to any game. In fact I think of it as worth half the prize of a game. There is nothing better then a manual that goes beyond the game itself and addresses technical (the men and their weapons) and historical issues. Besides being able to reap higher rewards when playing the game a good (read colossal) manual gives the time pressed player a possibility to live in the virtual universe of the game longer (who said escapism). You can read it when on the toilet, in the car/train/bus and … you get the picture. But the manual is very often neglected and one of the points where most other games fail. MicroProse used to excel in this realm (sold their games with high quality books/booklets filled with information, schematics and drawings). While I believe you did fairly well with CMBO, there is still room for some more extravagance (crossing fingers for CMBB manual). How about say a compendium of tactics, weapons etc. for CMBB, elaborating on stuff like differences between AP, APC, APCBC, HEAT, HE, APCR, APFSDS and HVAP. Well I guess there is nothing wrong with dreaming about it anyway. I know it takes time, drive, knowledge and overview to undertake such a project, but having pages left to read in such a beast would be better then money in the bank.

Yours truly

Frans E. Jensen

P.S.: By the way, which of the abovementioned AP rounds excl. HEAT (and of course HE) have an explosive core if any? Well at least not the last three I guess. Nations using these? Any answers and links to good websites would be much appreciated.

[Poobear]

Wipes tear awy from eye...."sniff"....ah shucks.

Ditto......2 times.

[Bastables]

Originally posted by HawkerT:

P.S.: By the way, which of the abovementioned AP rounds excl. HEAT (and of course HE) have an explosive core if any? Well at least not the last three I guess. Nations using these? Any answers and links to good websites would be much appreciated.

All the AP ammo are shells (Contain HE) with the exception of the "t" or subcalibre rounds. The only "European' armies who preferred solid AP Shot were the British Army and Commonwealth militaries supplied by them.

[HawkerT]

Thank you for your reply Bastables.

My grog skills has tremendous room for improvement, so I had to look up the definition for “sub-calibre rounds”. After a lot of searching (must be looking in the wrong places) I found a good website containing all the ins and outs of AFV munitions ballistics, not forgetting the plethora of pictures hosted – link at the bottom of this post.

For your reading pleasure I have excerpted the relevant section about sub calibre rounds. First pictures and then their WWII history and definition.

Sub-calibre amunition From left to right: German 28/20mm PzB 41 (Gerlich squeezebore) (28x187), French 37mm Mle 1935 APCR (37x94), German 37mm PaK 36 AP 40 APCR (37x248), British 2 pdr APSV Mk 2 (Littlejohn squeezebore) (40x304), Soviet 45mm APCR (45x310), German 5 cm KwK 38 L/42 APCR (50x289R), British 6 pdr APDS (57x441), Soviet 57mm APCR (57x480)

Sub-calibre projectiles, from left to right: sectioned German 28/20mm PzB 41 AT (without nose cap), British 2pdr APSV (Littlejohn Mk 1), Russian 45mm APCR, Russian 57mm APCR, British 6 pdr APDS, British 17 pdr APDS, core from 17 pdr (all replicas, except for the 28/20mm and the 17 pdr core)

SUB-CALIBRE PROJECTILES

This term is used to describe projectiles which are smaller than the caliber of the gun they are fired from. Nowadays this normally means APDS or APFSDS, but I will also deal with two related developments; APCR and squeezebore guns.

As we have seen, a large caliber will permit more energy to be generated than a small one. On the other hand, for a given projectile weight a smaller caliber will have a higher SD and therefore better long-range and AP performances. Designers have therefore tried different ways of combining the advantages of the two.

The simplest type was known to the British in WW2 as APCR (armour piercing, composite rigid - I have seen an early document which referred to this as "composite rigid armour piercing" but they presumably thought better of the acronym…), to the Americans as HVAP (high velocity armour piercing) and to the Germans as Hartkernmunition or Pzgr.40. However, it was probably the French who fielded it first, in the M1935 loading for the little 37x94R round still being used in some tank guns (there's a picture of one, plus sub-calibre projectiles, in the photo gallery on this website). It is nowadays commonly known as APHC, for armour piercing hard core, and is mainly used in MGs, HMGs and small-calibre cannon.

As the names suggest, this consists of a lightweight projectile (normally mainly aluminium) with a hard, small caliber core (normally tungsten alloy, which is heavier and harder than steel).The light projectile in a large-calibre gun gives a high muzzle velocity but when it strikes the target, only the hard core penetrates so it can go through much more armour than a full-calibre projectile of the same weight. The only disadvantage is that the light projectile has a low SD and therefore slows down more quickly than a normal projectile, steadily losing its penetration advantage as the range increases. To overcome this problem, later versions tended to be little if any lighter than a standard shell, thereby trading some of their short-range penetration for better long-range effectiveness. A modern example of this is the 30mm API used in the GAU-8/A cannon fitted to the A-10 aircraft; this is also unusual in having a depleted uranium core.

Another approach to achieving the best of both worlds was the squeezebore gun, of which there were two basic types; the Gerlich and the Littlejohn. In both, a projectile fitted with flanges to fit a large caliber barrel was squeezed down to a smaller caliber before it left the muzzle. The difference between them was that the Gerlich guns had tapered barrels whereas the Littlejohns had normal barrels with a tapered attachment fitted to the muzzle, in principle not unlike a shotgun choke. These worked very well and both saw limited service in WW2, the Gerlich in some German AT guns and the Littlejohn (named after the Czech designer, Janecek, which translates as little John) in some Allied armoured car and light tank guns. Their main problem, apart from the cost of the tungsten-cored ammo (and in the case of the Gerlich, the expensive barrel manufacturing) was that they could only fire this type of ammunition; they could not fire full-calibre HE shells. For this reason, they lost favour as soon as a better solution emerged.

The better solution was APDS, for armour piercing discarding sabot. This was like the APCR shell, except that the light alloy sabot (French for shoe) was designed to fall away from the small-calibre penetrator as soon as the projectile left the muzzle. This therefore combined the advantages of a large caliber for maximum energy with a small caliber for best flight and penetration performance, and allowed conventional ammunition to be fired from the same gun. It was initially designed in France before WW2, but was then developed in Canada and the UK, being issued for British 6pdr and 17pdr guns from mid-1944 onwards.

Apart from the cost and availability of the tungsten (always an issue in WW2) the only problem was that early version were very inaccurate because the flight of the projectile was disturbed by sabot separation. The British carried on using conventional AP tank ammunition into the 1950s, and APDS only really became supreme with the British 105mm tank gun of the late 1950s, which became the NATO standard for many years.

The replacement for APDS in tank guns (it is still used in small caliber cannon and HMGs) was APFSDS, which takes the design principles to their logical conclusion in producing the longest and thinnest practical projectile. The problem, as we have seen, is that achieving stability by spinning doesn't work with such long projectiles so they have to be fin stabilised. Modern manufacturing quality means that a high degree of accuracy can be achieved, and APFSDS seems likely to remain the supreme penetrator until conventional guns are replaced by different technologies.

SOURCES:

NRA Firearms Fact Book (3rd edition, 1989). A fascinating compendium of assorted data from the American National Rifle Association.

Handbook for Shooters and Reloaders by P. O. Ackley - a classic, which comes with a pack of charts and tables for do-it-yourself ballistics without formulae, let alone computer programmes.

Brassey's Military Ballistics, by Moss, Leeming and Farrar

...and decades of collecting odd snippets of information from all over the place

I could not however find any reference to “t” rounds. Please elaborate on this, I assume it refers to Tungsten rounds?

Now back to the AP shells . I hope I am not being a nuisance when asking these few questions.

A) Is the implication of the above that all the German WWII AFV tank gun full-calibre rounds shown below contain HE, and that this is true for all except Commonwealth nations?

Is there a direct link from the exploding 20mm-30mm rounds fired from WWII fighter aircraft auto cannons, to the rounds shown below?

C) Is the ammunition used for the AFV’s the same used by towed AT guns?

D) Is AP shells found on lower calibre guns as well, say 12.7mm or even 7.62mm fired from HMG’s/LMG’s, or are these rounds just AP shots?

From left to right: 3.7cm (37x250mm), 5cm L/42 Pzgr 40 (50x289mm), 5cm L/60 (50x420mm), 7.5cm L/24 (75x243mm), 7.5cm L/43 and L/48 (75x495mm), 7.5cm L/70 (75x640mm), 8.8cm L/56 (88x571mm), 8.8cm L/71 (88x822mm).

All the above information is excerpts from this excellent website CANNON, MACHINE GUNS AND AMMUNITION

[ September 06, 2002, 03:41 AM: Message edited by: HawkerT ]

[Bastables]

Yes, t is CM short hand for all sub-caliber rounds. Or t= tungstun rounds.

[Bastables]

Originally posted by HawkerT:

Thank you for your reply Bastables.

Now back to the AP shells . I hope I am not being a nuisance when asking these few questions.

A) Is the implication of the above that all the German WWII AFV tank gun full-calibre rounds shown below contain HE, and that this is true for all except Commonwealth nations?

Is there a direct link from the exploding 20mm-30mm rounds fired from WWII fighter aircraft auto cannons, to the rounds shown below?

C) Is the ammunition used for the AFV’s the same used by towed AT guns?

D) Is AP shells found on lower calibre guns as well, say 12.7mm or even 7.62mm fired from HMG’s/LMG’s, or are these rounds just AP shots?

I’ll do my best, but you’d be better off joining the forum at A.G. Williams site and getting the real deal from the gun gurus themselves.

A) Yes since they're all German ones.

??? Not really since destroying aircraft and killing tanks are two separate tasks. For instance the Germens with their 2/3cm thin walled high HE content Minengeschoss relied on chemical energy for destructive affects. The Russians on the other hand although also enamoured of chemical energy were designing for the greatest velocities available for flatter trajectories and shorter time to target. So what you get is the Mauser 151/20 of the Germans firing a range of ammo types but unable to fire a worthwhile AP shot versus the Russian ShVAK and lighter B-20 fire a range of ammo type but are unable to fire a Minengeschoss type round although standard AP/T AP and APHE were available amongst others. These ammo types and restrictions continue up to the German/Russian “big” cannons of 3cm 3,7cm and 4,5cm.

C) Some times yes, some times no. For instance the KwK 42 of the Panther/PIV/70, KwK/StuK 40 of the PIV/StuG and the PaK 39 anti-tank gun all fired the same shells 7,5cm but were attached to different cases with differing charges. Therefore receiving differing designations for the different cartridges. The 17-pdr guns on the British Sherman Firefly fired the same cartridges as the 17pdr anti-tank gun but not the same short cartridge fired by the 17pdr/77mm gun mounted in the Comet tank.

D) It’s usually acknowledged that the smallest shell that is useful for placing HE in is the 2cm calibre (at least when blowing up equipment). This did not stop the Russians developing exploding bullets for rifles and then having the Czar decided that that development was so beastly and inhumane it should be banned by international agreement. For aircraft mounted MG131 13mm and UBK/T 12,7mm HE/T rounds were available.

[HawkerT]

Bastables, thank you very much for your high quality answers. Interesting topic this. I must try to dig a little deeper in the future when I have some more time on my hands.

If you desire some cannonfodder trainig then please, feel free to send me a CMBB setup file. I have only had time to play the Tutorial (Both sides) and Yelnia Stare (Axis), so we could do the third one blind perhaps ? I'm not terribly good but will die with honour and return at least one turn a day.

Thank you again.